Outside Qingqiu Fox Valley, lush green grass stretched in every direction, wildflowers carpeted the ground, butterflies danced, and bees buzzed. Little foxes of every color frolicked and ran across the grass without a care in the world.
Amid the foxes was a peculiar little beast with a dragon's head, a qilin's body, and a long tail. It tumbled about with the little foxes, utterly devoid of a giant beast's majesty.
Wu Chu reclined sideways on a hill, a wine flask in hand, propping up his head as he silently watched everything.
The space around him rippled like water, and a purple figure emerged barefoot from the waves. A red cord was tied around her jade-white ankle, bearing a golden bell shaped like a lotus seed. The newcomer was Fox Ancestress Qingqiu Li.
"What are you looking at?" she asked.
Wu Chu's gaze was utterly drawn to those jade feet. They were every foot lover's dream.
"Hope!"
"Hm?"
Wu Chu's eyes traveled upward from her feet before finally settling on her face. "What I'm looking at is hope! They are the future of the Qingqiu Clan, aren't they?"
Fox Ancestress sat down beside Wu Chu, leaning against him as she watched the little foxes chasing and playing across the grass.
These little foxes still did not know the fate of the Qingqiu Foxes who had followed the Qilin Clan. They had never witnessed that great battle. They had been quietly taken away from Mount Buzhou and, in a daze, brought to Qingqiu, back to the ancestral land of the Qingqiu Foxes.
Looking at how things had ended, it would have been better if they had never joined the Three Clans.
Yet if they had not joined the Three Clans back then, they would likely have been wiped out by them directly.